Killer's Gambit

by Hermione Stark

  “It would have been you if our ancestors hadn’t fucked it up,” said Storm. “And I’m sure you’re doing a better job of it than I could have.”

  Evie was silent for a long moment, and then when she spoke again her voice was light and cheery as if she had decided that she was getting nowhere with the other conversation and it wasn’t worth her time to pursue it right now. “I’m glad you answered,” she said. “I had been thinking I should call Saskia, but wanted to call you first to see how she was doing.”

  “Not good. She won’t listen to me. You calling her isn’t going to make any difference. I think you should come to visit.”

  Evie laughed with no amusement. “You mean stage an intervention? You might have noticed that I have three young children, and I have far too many responsibilities to drop them for this.”

  “You have a younger sister too,” said Storm quietly. “And after what we did, we owe it to her to make sure her life is happy.”

  “What we did?” repeated Evie quietly. “We did what we had to. It was a duty. And I have told you that I never want to speak of it again.”

  “And we never have spoken of it,” he said, his voice raw. “But that didn’t mean there weren’t consequences. Saskia needs us.”

  “I’ve done my best with her. I offered her a home, but she refused to take it. She flung it back in my face.” Evie was always subtle. This was her way of telling him that she had taken her turn trying to look after Saskia, and now it was Storm’s turn, and he could damn well deal with it.

  But Storm knew that he couldn’t help Saskia on its own. Saskia had self-destructive streak that if left unchecked would turn into a raging fire. One none of them would be able to put out. She wouldn’t listen to him. He had spent many long hours last night thinking of what he might be able to say to get through to her, or who could speak to her that she might listen to. In the end he’d even had the mad thought that she might listen to Diana. Diana was nearer Saskia’s age, she was unconventional, she was … Compelling. Hell she might even see something with her psychic vision that would make Saskia listen.

  But that was the problem; Diana’s psychic visions and what she might see that she was not supposed to see. Things that were better left buried for everyone’s sake. He could just imagine what Evie would say if he told her that he had been working closely with a very perceptive psychic. She would be furious. And so he couldn’t turn to Diana for help even if she had still been working with him. He needed to keep Diana as far from Saskia as possible. Saskia needed Evie.

  “Saskia was a kid,” he said. “She didn’t get along with your husband and she didn’t want to live with him. Can you blame her? She probably felt like an outsider, and that has always been the problem. They took her away from us, and all she really wants is her family but she is too scared to let us in. She is still a kid, Evie. She needs us both. So will you please just come for dinner this Saturday so that we can talk to her? I think it would make a difference.”

  He could almost hear the cogs turning in Evie’s brain. He suspected that it was him that she did not want to see, not Saskia. Storm waited for her to make up her mind. He had stated his case. His ever logical big sister would not appreciate him trying to cajole her into making a decision.

  As he waited, Storm looked out of the glass wall of his office towards the glass double doors on the far side of the open plan office. Leo and Remi should be making their way back right about now. He needed this conversation with Evie to wrap up soon, but saying that to Evie would not help matters. She thought his job was taking him away from his true calling. His heritage. The position of power that he had been born to, as she had so often told him.

  “Maybe you can bring the girls?” Storm offered. “And stay for the weekend? It would be good to see them. I haven’t seen them since what they were so little.”

  “If you miss children in your life, you could easily start a family of your own. You already have half of one here.”

  “All I meant was that it would be nice to see my nieces.”

  “No,” said Evie shortly. “Nash can damn well take care of them himself while I’m way. And it’s your own fault that you never see them. If you were here in the Realm you would see them all the time. They would have valued having their uncle around to play with.”

  Storm winced. Evie knew exactly how to make him feel guilty.

  Across the office floor Storm saw the elevator open and Leo and Remi step out of it. And with a sinking feeling he saw the chief immediately walk out of his own office to intercept them. Unable to hear what they were saying, he could only watch their body language. Remi said something, and the chief responded. And Storm didn’t need to hear the words to know that trouble was headed his way. Damn it.

  “Sorry Evie,” he said. “I have to go. See you Saturday.” He hung up, knowing that she would be furious that he’d made her decision for her.

  Chapter 17

  STORM

  Minutes later the chief arrived at Storm’s office, trailed by Remi and Leo. Remi shot Storm an apologetic look over the chief’s shoulder. Clearly the chief had grilled her and Leo, and they had been forced to confirm the truth of where they had been.

  “Agents Kane and Bronwyn tell me that they’ve been interviewing a witness related to an old Devil Claw Killer case,” said the chief to Storm. “But they haven’t been able to tell me quite what this has got to do with any of the current cases that are assigned to your team.”

  “It’s to do with a historical case, chief,” said Storm.

  “And would that be a cold case or a closed case?” said that this chief shrewdly.

  “A closed case, sir,” said Remi quickly. “But it had nothing to do with Agent Storm. It was me. I thought it would be —”

  “Agents Kane and Bronwyn were acting on my authorization, chief,” said Storm formally, interrupting Remi who had been about to martyr herself.

  “Your authorization to do what, exactly?”

  Storm knew that there was no point lying. He liked the chief. He had no intention of ruining the trust between them now. “I asked them to run down a lead in relation to the link between Steffane Ronin and the Devil Claw Killer.”

  “And we found it!” said Remi quickly. “We questioned Officer Tamara Westmoor’s best friend, who was able to tell us that Officer Westmoor dated Steffane Ronin for a year. She dated him! The best friend met Ronin several times and was acquainted with him. She said that the relationship ended when Officer Westmoor argued with Ronin. There was a messy breakup, and subsequently Officer Westmoor began an unofficial and determined investigation into Steffane Ronin, believing that he had been involved in a number of crimes. She was relentless, and said she was getting close to finding some important evidence. And then Officer Westmoor was murdered by DCK. And we think Steffane Ronin may have known Devil Claw personally!”

  Remi’s voice had risen in excitement, and even Storm was astonished to hear that Officer Tamara Westmoor had been involved in a romantic relationship with Steffane Ronin. The woman must have known him well, and that she had then gone on to become a victim of Devil Claw was compelling. But clearly the chief did not think so, because he squashed Remi’s excitement with a simple question. “And did Officer Westmoor find this important evidence?”

  “No, sir,” said Remi, deflating.

  “I see,” said the chief flatly.

  Storm could see that Remi was about to say something to the chief, probably speculation that perhaps Westmoor had discovered an actual link between Devil Claw and Steffane Ronin. Knowing that this conjecture would not help matters, Storm gave her a look which firmly told her that it would be best to stay quiet. She bit her lip and complied.

  The chief sighed heavily. “I gave this team a direct order to not pursue the Steffane Ronin case, and now that this team has admitted to disobeying a direct order, I have no alternative but to suspend all of you with immediate effect.”

  “But sir—” said Remi, looking shocked. She stopped spea
king when the chief gave her a sharp look.

  He continued, “The vampire council members and the Otherworld embassy representatives made it very clear to me that they would be keeping an eye on all aspects of anything to do with the Steffane Ronin case, and given that you have questioned an acquaintance of his, I can only hope that you were discreet. Because if they find out, your suspension could well turn into a termination.”

  Remi’s face turned pale, and Leo’s stayed as stoic as ever even though Storm knew how important the job was to Leo. Leo was a lone werewolf. The job was Leo’s pack. And Leo would not do well without it. Leo was Storm’s second in command, relentlessly hard-working. Storm would not allow him to lose his job.

  “Remi, Leo, if you could give me a moment alone with the chief please,” said Storm, and waited until Leo and Remi left his office and closed the door behind them.

  The chief spoke first. “I am severely disappointed in this team. I thought you all valued your jobs more than this. I told you the gravity of this matter. You know that I might have no choice but to fire you all.”

  Storm nodded. He flipped the switch that turned the glass walls of his office opaque. A bit of privacy might help matters. He returned to his chair and slumped back down into it, not bothering to hide how tired he felt.

  “We’ve lost a member of our team and we want her back,” he said simply. “You know that this new lead is valid, right?”

  “And you know that this new lead is highly unlikely to lead to any concrete evidence that Steffane Ronin was innocent. And concrete evidence is the only way that I could allow you to touch the Ronin case. The best I can do for you now is a suspension and hope that the embassy people do not request to take this any further. You know the battles that we have to fight constantly to maintain our authority and our jurisdiction, and Diana Bellona has casually trod on some extremely important toes. She’s a liability. She doesn’t care who she upsets.”

  “She’s good at her job, and we both knew what we were getting into when we hired her,” Storm retorted.

  The chief gave a huff of annoyance and sat back down in the chair opposite Storm. Storm was pretty sure that if there had been a bottle of whiskey there, the chief would have poured them both a glass. He also knew that the chief liked Diana a lot. And that the last thing the chief wanted was to fire her. The chief was still currently unaware that Diana had walked out. And Storm had no intention of telling him. Yet.

  The chief massaged the back of his neck with his hand as if he had a painful kink there. He looked thoughtful, so Storm kept pushing, “Diana’s heart is in the right place. She wants to put bad guys away, and that’s why were here, isn’t it? She’s a valuable asset to this team. She’s closed on average a case per week for every single week that she has worked here. Could we say that about any other of our Agents?”

  “She is a pain in the butt, is what she is,” said the chief.

  “Clearly the embassy heavies thought so too,” retorted Storm.

  The chief gave a grudging smile. Storm knew that there was nothing the chief liked more than to stick it to his superiors when he thought they were being unnecessarily bureaucratic.

  “I’m going on holiday,” said the chief abruptly

  “I’m aware of that, sir,” said Storm.

  “And I don’t intend to follow your example and come back from holiday even more stressed than I was before I left,” said the chief. “I’m so busy right now, it being my last day, that I suspect I’m going to forget to do a thing or two. Like submitting your suspension paperwork.” He gave the Storm a meaningful look.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Storm.

  “I plan on totally switching off this holiday. Including switching off my phone. I’m going to be completely unavailable, and when I come back it’ll be my expectation that any issues that currently exist will have resolved themselves as if by magic.”

  Storm tried not to smile. He nodded. “I’m sure they will have, sir.”

  “Because I would hate to fire my best team,” said the chief as his parting shot. “Especially knowing that the Otherworld embassy will make sure that the five of you never find work in this field again, and knowing vampires, unemployment might become the least of your worries.”

  Chapter 18

  DIANA

  It was mid-afternoon by the time I finally made my way to the address that Audriett Ronin had given me for the house that Joshua Ashbeck and his daughter Leonie had once lived in.

  All I had left now was this case. I’d walked out on my team and I’d spent most of today trying not to think about it. I felt crap. These past three weeks working with the Agency and the team had felt like the steadiest three weeks in my life. My loft office at Agency Headquarters had begun to feel like home. But now I’d walked out.

  I knew it was my fault, but that didn’t stop me from being angry at Storm. I had almost thought he would stop me, and that he would agree to help.

  It just went to show that myself is all I ever really had. Just me, myself, and I. Just me and my goddamn navelstone, which must have started vibrating sometime during my fight with Storm and had not stopped since. All day it had been a tiny tremor in my midsection, demanding with urgency that I had to find the Devil Claw Killer. I had to investigate this case. There was no alternative.

  Magda was dead. I remembered the day I had found her so clearly in my mind. I had seen DCK’s mark, the bloody clawed pawprint, on her kitchen door. My mind had refused to believe what it was seeing, so I had opened that door and found Magda lying in a pool of her own blood on the linoleum of her tiny kitchen. Her body had been savaged, but her face had been untouched. He had killed her, like he had killed twenty-seven other women in just eight years, for nothing other than his own pleasure. He was a monster who had to be stopped. How fitting that I, supposedly the Angel of Death, was going to stop him. A monster to kill a monster.

  I bit my lip. If that’s what I was. It seemed impossible sometimes. Surreal. But why else did I have this overwhelming killing urge that blew up out of nowhere and made me fear that I would do something terrible to someone who didn’t deserve it? If I had to kill someone it was going to be him. And then maybe, once I had killed such a terrible monster, it would be out of my system for good, and I could get on with my life.

  I arrived at the address and jabbed the doorbell. My best hope was that the current resident would have a forwarding address for Constance Ashbeck. I doubted it, but I had to try. When nobody answered the doorbell, I stuck my ear against the door and listened. I couldn’t hear any sound within, but that didn’t mean someone was not at home. So I stuck my finger back on the doorbell and kept it pressed down.

  It would be damn annoying if no one was in. I had wasted several hours already today hanging around the Petrichor Club with Finch, interviewing the few staff who we had in found the during the daytime. Finch had insisted on coming with me. He was determined to find Zezi. It made me almost felt guilty that she had dropped down on the list of my priorities. It was good that Finch was involved now. He had said that he would go back in the night time when the club was open to interview the customers. I hoped he would have some luck, but I was worried that he wouldn’t make much progress. Finch wasn’t exactly a pushy guy, and sometimes you had to be pushy to make people speak. Or you had to be a psychic like me and sense that they knew something that they were unwilling to tell you.

  It had been quite nice having Finch for company. Perhaps I’d become a private detective and work for myself. Perhaps once I was making enough money I’d offer Finch a job. But I didn’t want to think about that. Because it meant accepting the fact that I no longer worked with Storm and his team, and that was not something I was ready to deal with.

  I had had my finger pressed to the buzzer for a full minute now, and still nobody had answered the doorbell. And yet I felt certain that somebody was inside. I had closed my eyes and tuned into my psychic radar and I could feel their presence like a faint hum in the web of the psychic backgrou
nd music. I was sure that someone was inside, and wishing that I would go the hell away. So I took my finger off the buzzer and then I jabbed it repeatedly, which was far more annoying an experience for them.

  Some minutes later, someone finally came to the door. I could see them on the other side as they peeked through the peephole at me. I no longer had my Agency badge to flash, so I yelled through the door instead, “Hello! My name is Diana. I need to speak with you.”

  The woman who finally open the door had dark uncombed hair and thick eyebrows. She was a faded beauty in her early forties who looked like she had taken great care in her appearance at one time, but not any more. She peered at me warily through the narrow gap she had opened in the door, leaving the safety chain on. Which was quite funny really, because I could have broken it with a kick, and I wasn’t particularly strong. The woman seemed fully aware of this, and I was sure that she had her shoulder and her foot wedged up against the door as a precaution.